• Charity group Upliftment Jamaica is converting a Goodyear tire factory into a call center in St. Thomas, Jamaica. It is hoped that the new center will employ hundreds of local residents.
  
  Jamaica Observer, 15 Dec. 2005

• Jamaican telecom company Cable & Wireless will lay off 100 call center workers. The company denies rumors that the call center will be relocated to Trinidad.
  
  Jamaica Observer, 14 Dec. 2005

• ClientLogic is laying off nearly 900 employees in Derby and Bristol, England because their client, phone company BT, is moving some operations to India. Employees are angry at the pre-holiday timing of the decision.
  
  BBC News, 13 Dec. 2005

• Oak Brook, Illinois-based SEI, a service desk outsourcer, opened a call center in Clovis, New Mexico recently. The 10-person center will likely hire ten more people later.
  
  Clovis News Journal, 12 Dec. 2005

• Dell is opening a call center in Ottowa, Ontario in February, 2006. It is expected to employ about 500 people, though not right away.
  
  SooToday.com, 9 Dec. 2005

Call centers in Germany are "booming," says DW World.

Call Center Forum Deutschland, reports that Germany has 2,800 call centers, employing 330,000 people. In the last two and a half years, the forum says, 35,000 call center jobs have been created. 77% of German call center employees are women. 55% of employees work full time, and the average pay is 28,000 Euros ($33,000).

DW World quoted a state economics minister, Otto Ebnet, "The call center branch is the fastest growing business sector in Mecklenburg-Western Pommerania. In the last 12 months alone, about 1,000 new employees have been hired in service centers."

A New Zealand social services call center is having major problems with abandoned calls. According to a New Zealand news source, the Child, Youth, and Family Service call center has missed 40,515 calls, or about 5% between January and October of this year. The center received a total of 768,403 calls, 727,888 of which were answered within 20 seconds, the source said.

Two years ago, a father called the center because he was worried about the way his kids were being treated by their mother's boyfriend. That boyfriend ended up killing one of the children eight months later, prompting an investigation into the way the CYF call center handled callers.

The center now records and archives all agent/caller interactions. The investigation is ongoing.

In other call center violence news, a Bangalore, India, call center agent was murdered by the driver who picked her up for work. It is common in India for call centers to provide employees with rides to and from work. This is apparently the first such incident.